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PARTISAN REVIEW
the Third World of the spiritual hunger, moral guilt, or ideological
dissonances of the West must necessarily impede any chances of
helpfulness. The Third World is not a playground for Western
utopianism.
From a theological perspective, however, a Christian can only
reiterate that the Kingdom of God is not of this world . (In Jewish
terms: The Messiah has not yet come.) The alleviation of human
misery and the resistance to oppression are moral imperatives, not
acts that bring closer the
eschaton.
The means of grace and the
promises of salvation are as close, and as hard to discern, in familiar
places as they are in the exotic zones of the globe. In Leopold von
Ranke's formulation, every age is immediate to God; so is every
culture, every country. Each generation of crusaders discovers that
the Holy Land, if and when they reach it, is but another zone of the
same earth. There is no escape from the human condition
outremer.
They may then also discover the truth that Harold Lamb put
into the last lines of his very compassionate history of the
Crusades-that God's Jerusalem lies beyond all the seas of this
world.
Coming in
PARTISAN REVIEW
• Stanislaw Baranczak on the Polish complex
• Barbara Rose on Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock
• Ronald Hayman on Bertolt Brecht
• Milan Kundera on modem writing
• Andrei Siniavsky on the joke in the joke
• Roger Shattuck on the 1935 Paris Writers' Congress
• Glenway Wescott on remembering Marianne Moore
• Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on biography
